The drawing in question, "Holy Child," is disputed. Some say Leonardo did it. Others instead attribute it to one of the polymath's students. Now the drawing is the focus of the Leonardo da Vinci DNA Project, a group of scientists on a decade-long odyssey to track down Leonardo's DNA.

In a new preprint, these researchers say they have recovered Y chromosome sequences from both this artwork and from a letter penned by a cousin of Leonardo. Here's the wild part: Both sequences belong to a genetic grouping of people who share a common ancestor in Tuscany, where Leonardo was born.

That's not proof that the "Holy Child" DNA is from Leonardo himself. Thousands of different people could potentially bear the same sequence in their Y chromosomes. The researchers say "it's a flip of a coin" if the DNA really belonged to Leonardo.

It turns out that proving the DNA is Leonardo's is a really hard problem—because scientists can’t verify the sequences against any DNA samples known to have come from Leonardo himself. His burial site was disturbed early in the 19th century, and he had no direct descendants.

But if these researchers eventually pin down Leonardo’s Y chromosome, that portends a revolution in art authentication. It'd be a coup for an emerging field called "arteomics," which analyzes trace biomolecules within an artwork to reconstruct its history and how it was made.